Tea Party billionaire booed in Brooklyn

Billionaire industrialist David Koch has lately taken on unusual dual roles. He is a high-profile philanthropist of New York culture and medicine and a major underwriter of the Tea Party and Astroturf “grassroots” outfits spreading skepticism about global warming.

As a result, over the holidays, Koch was on the receiving end of a Bronx Cheer — in Brooklyn.

Koch donated a matching grant of $2.5 million to underwrite a “Nutcracker” ballet performance by Alexei Ratmansky, which was given a special opening performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The audience was described in the New York Times as “harried Brooklyn moms and salivating balletomanes” — not exactly the kind of crowd you’d expect at a rally against Obama’s health care reform.

The result was an audience eruption even before the curtain opened. In the words of John Gapper of The Financial Times, who was in the audience:

The excitement started even before the show when David H. Koch, the co-owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately owned conglomerate in the U.S., came on stage to talk about his $2.5 m sponsorship of the production.

Most people applauded but there were also boos from near where I sat in the balcony, followed by an angry debate in the row in front of me, with one of the booers declaring ‘he’s an evil man’ and a couple next to her telling her to ‘shut up’ and leave the theatre …

Once Mr. Koch had left the stage, the booing stopped and the ballet started.

Koch and his brother have bankrolled conservative causes for more than two decades, but kept an extremely low profile. Until last fall, the most frequent national mention of David Koch came as a supporter of PBS’ “Nova.”

Then, however, The New Yorker ran a major investigative piece on the Koch Brothers. It focused on such causes at the 2004 Swift Boat vets attack on John Kerry, the campaign against global warming science and the financial underpinnings of the Tea Party movement.

The piece exposed contradictions. Koch Industries has campaigned against regulation of cancer-causing chemicals, but David Koch has given $40 million to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Koch has been a major financial backer of the New York City Ballet, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He donated $10 million-plus to repair fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum.

With New York being New York, however, Kohn’s generosity brings him into social contact with prominent Democrats.

He was scheduled to be honored at a ballet gala last summer, with first lady Michelle Obama set to be on the dais. The first lady had a last minute schedule conflict, sparing her a close encounter with someone who has committed millions to bringing down her husband’s presidency.